Apocalypse of the Dead. Joe Mckinney

over the buildings behind them and saw a hotel. That’s where they’re coming from, he figured. And that meant there were going to be a lot more of them soon. This part of Sarasota was almost completely made up of hotels and businesses that catered to the tourist crowd. Few of the people stuck here would know the area well enough to get away quickly, which would turn them into sitting ducks.

      A shot broke his train of thought. He didn’t so much as hear the crack of the report as feel the whistle of air as the bullet passed just inches from his face.

      “What the fuck?” he said, and looked at the old dude in the cowboy hat.

      The man pointed to the open doorway behind him with a nod of his chin.

      Billy looked behind him and saw an old woman whose lower lip and part of her cheek had been chewed off. It looked like the fingers on her right hand had been bitten off, too.

      And now, there was a bullet hole in her forehead.

      Billy quickly gauged the distance between himself and the old dude who had just fired. It looked to be about forty-five to fifty yards. Billy didn’t like guns, but he knew enough about them to respect what they could do. And he knew shooting wasn’t as easy as they made it out to be in the movies. Even with a rifle, landing a kill shot at that distance wouldn’t be a guarantee. To do it with a revolver was either very lucky or the product of someone who was an extremely gifted shooter.

      “Ed, what’s happening?” the woman beside Billy yelled.

      “We need to make it to the nurse’s station,” the old dude in the cowboy hat called back.

      The woman turned to Billy. “This way, come on.”

      The old man in his arms was groaning, and Billy was suddenly aware of how roughly he was treating him.

      “Sorry, guy,” he said. “Hang in there.”

      The man only groaned.

      Zombies were pouring into the courtyard all around them. They were in some kind of central hub for the old-folks’ home, Billy figured, and they were starting to attract a pretty big crowd.

      For a moment, Billy fought the urge to drop the old man and run for it. There were still large gaps between the zombies, and he was fast enough that he could probably make it through without even coming close to an infected person. But just as quickly he shot that thought down. He wasn’t a coward, and that’s what he’d be if he dropped the old man and ran for it. No, that wasn’t him at all.

      Billy’s group and the old cowboy’s group came together in the middle of the courtyard.

      The cowboy looked at the man in Billy’s arms.

      “Hey, Art, you okay?”

      The old man tried to answer, but it just came out as a slurred mumble.

      “I don’t think he got bit,” Billy said.

      The old cowboy nodded. “You’re okay, carrying him?”

      “I got him.”

      The squat woman with the two kids came up and whispered to the cowboy, “Ed, what are we gonna do?”

      “We’re gonna have to shoot our way through. Can everybody move okay?” he said, looking at the others. They all nodded back. “Okay. Let’s get going.”

      A zombie, faster than the others, had made it dangerously close to them. Ed motioned for Billy to stand aside. He raised one of his revolvers and dropped the zombie with an effortless one-handed shot.

      As Billy watched, the old man released the catch on the revolver and opened up the cylinder. He depressed the plunger and ejected all six spent shell casings onto the grass. Then he took a speed loader from a leather pouch on his belt, fed it into the cylinder, twisted the knob to release the bullets into their chambers, and then with a flick of his wrist snapped the cylinder closed.

      “Where’d you learn to handle a gun like that, old man,” Billy said.

      “I spent thirty-five years of my life putting men like you into outfits like that.”

      The little boy who had been standing behind the cowboy was staring at Billy, half frightened, half fascinated.

      “What are looking at?” Billy said.

      The boy’s eyes got even wider. His Adam’s apple pistoned up and down.

      Just then, Ed Moore pushed his way around Billy and stepped slightly ahead of the group. “Come on, everybody. Nobody stops moving.”

      Billy was impressed, despite himself. The old cowboy moved with a fluidity that surprised him. He kept up a steady stream of fire, not wasting any bullets, not letting the moans and the horror of all those ruined bodies rush his shots. He fired all the way through both revolvers, then emptied the cylinders and reloaded without losing a step.

      In all the reading Billy had done on the subject, and in all the documentaries he’d watched, every single commentator said that the best type of handgun to have in a fight against a large group of the infected was a semi-automatic, preferably a 9mm, as it offered the best compromise between magazine capacity and stopping power and ease of reloading in a combat situation.

      But all those commentators had clearly never seen what you could do with a pair of six-shooters if you knew how to use them properly.

      Ed cleared the path for them all the way to nurse’s station, a large, pink stucco cottage with narrow windows all around it, and they slipped inside the doorway without ever having to break into a trot.

      He made it look easy.

      “Put him over there,” Ed told the kid in the orange prison scrubs, and pointed with the barrel of his pistol to a large overstuffed chair in the middle of the room.

      He holstered his guns and looked around. The others were huddled in the middle of the room. The kids were holding on to Margaret’s legs like they weren’t ever going to let go. Julie Carnes was giving Art Waller the once-over. Barbie Denkins didn’t seem to have any idea where she was. She just looked scared and small.

      Ed walked over to the door they’d just entered and slid a desk in front of it. The zombies were already pounding on the other side of the door, and the desk wouldn’t hold them for long.

      He went to one of the windows and looked out over the courtyard. There were bodies crumpled up on the ground in a long, meandering line that roughly paralleled their path across the courtyard. But there were a hundred or more of the infected still on their feet, and the combined sound of all their moans was deafening.

      And they were coming toward the nurses’ station.

      “That was pretty fucking incredible shooting you did out there,” said the man in the orange scrubs.

      Ed felt a wave of disgust swell up inside him. As a marshal, and an oil field worker before that, he’d been around men who cussed all his life. But he’d never tolerated it. To him, a man who cussed was a man who lacked self-control and respect for others.

      A man who cussed around women and children was lower than low.

      “Please watch your language around these people,” he said.

      “Huh?” The smile slid off the prisoner’s face, replaced just as quickly by a sneer. “Fuck you, old man.”

      Ed turned on him. The prisoner was shaking his hands like he was working out the kinks, getting ready to ball them into fists. Ed stood still and waited, watching the man’s eyes and his shoulders. If he was going to do something, it would start there, the eyes squinting and the shoulders dropping just a hair to prepare for a punch.

      “Ed?” It was Julie Carnes. She came up next to him like she had no clue what was going on between the two men and said, “Ed, it’s Art. He’s not doing so good. We need to get him some help.”

      Ed forced himself to look away from the younger man, and as he did so, he felt a momentary wash of guilt